Old photographs often have artifacts, such as, tears, creases, stains, and scratches, due to mishandling, neglect, and deleterious effects generally caused by the environments in which the photographs are stored. Attempts at removing the artifacts are often made by digitally reproducing the old photographs and by employing a digital imaging tool designed to repair the defects.
In addition, photographs often contain other undesirable objects, such as, moles and date stamps, that users would like to remove from the images. As used herein, “undesirable objects” may be considered as referring to the artifacts and/or objects, and “undesirable pixels” may be considered as referring to the pixels forming the artifacts and/or objects, that a user may wish to remove from an image, such as, a photograph.
Conventional computer tools are available to automatically identify some of the undesirable objects and operate by simply identifying anything in the image having a certain characteristic. These conventional computer tools are known, however, to misinterpret the image data and classify actual features in the images as undesirable objects. This often results in smoothing of features in the image as these features are replaced with values computed from average values of pixels around the features. In addition, because these conventional computer tools are often unaware of the actual locations of the undesirable pixels, the conventional computer tools often expend a great deal of time and capacity is seeking for the undesirable pixels.
Other conventional computer tools enable users to manually identify and correct the undesirable pixels in the image. In order to effectively use these computer tools, users are typically required to have a relatively high skill level with respect to the computer tools as well as to be able to precisely determine and apply the correct replacement pixel values for the undesirable pixels. As such, conventional computer tools are difficult to employ and often result in inaccurate replacement pixel values for the undesirable pixels.